Rural Manitoba nurse leaders’ perceptions of practice environment empowerment structures

Abstract

Abstract Current and ongoing shortages of nurses impact access to patient care, decreasing resource accessibility for rural populations. Current health care demands transformation to address nurse retention. Improving rural nurse job satisfaction by creating access to empowerment structures and organizational support must be a priority for nurse leaders. Pursuing research focusing on rural nursing leaders’ understanding of empowerment is crucial to address significant gaps in understanding recruitment and retention in rural Manitoba communities. The purpose of this study was to investigate how rural nurse leaders understand and create empowered practice environments. Research question were: 1) How do nurse leaders describe and understand structural empowerment? 2) What organizational structures do nurse leaders identify as essential to empowered environments? (i.e., support, resources, information, opportunity), and 3) How do nurse leaders create structures supporting empowered environments? Using a qualitative descriptive design, recruitment via purposive and snowball sampling, data was collected using semi-structured interviews which provided a rich understanding of the context in which nurse leaders inform empowered working environments. Two themes emerged from the data: Support and Relationships and Rural Roots. As Manitoba has one of the highest rural populations in Canada, adopting approaches informed by structural empowerment, equips rural nurse leaders with the capacity to participate in health transformation. This study adds to understanding rural nurse leaders’ perspectives, informing rural policy and practice environment structures. Knowledge from this study can inform strategies aimed at creating empowered practice environments by reducing nurse role stress and ambiguity, increasing positive emotions, and increasing job satisfaction supporting retention.